"Brash persuasively argues that Michael Bloomberg's image as a 'CEO Mayor' who governs New York in a nonpolitical and nonideological way does not reflect the agenda behind 'Bloomberg's Way.'"
—Choice

“A very substantial contribution to the study of politics and governance in New York City and to scholarship on urban development politics more generally. Brash’s ability to move gracefully between conceptual issues and empirical detail makes the book highly readable and even entertaining; the chapters on the Hudson Yards case, for example, should be required reading for courses on urban planning.”
—William Sites, author of Remaking New York: Primitive Globalization and the Politics of Urban Community

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg claims to run the city like a business. In Bloomberg’s New York, Julian Brash applies methods from anthropology, geography, and other social science disciplines to examine what that means. He describes the mayor’s attitude toward governance as the Bloomberg Way—a philosophy that holds up the mayor as CEO, government as a private corporation, desirable residents and businesses as customers and clients, and the city itself as a product to be branded and marketed as a luxury good.

Commonly represented as pragmatic and nonideological, the Bloomberg Way, Brash argues, is in fact an ambitious reformulation of neoliberal governance that advances specific class interests. He considers the implications of this in a blow-by-blow account of the debate over the Hudson Yards plan, which aimed to transform Manhattan’s far west side into the city’s next great high-end district. Bringing this plan to fruition proved surprisingly difficult as activists and entrenched interests pushed back against the Bloomberg administration, suggesting that despite Bloomberg’s success in redrawing the rules of urban governance, older political arrangements—and opportunities for social justice—remain.